


Pair-Bond

by Snickfic



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: 2017 Stanley Cup Playoffs, Angst, Feelings, M/M, Pittsburgh Penguins, team poly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-06 02:25:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14632143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: “I miss you out there, man.”Shame burned hot in Kris’s throat. It made it hard to speak. “I know. Next year, I’ll—” But Dumo needed him now, the team needed him now, and he was stuck up there in the box with a bum neck and a bird’s-eye view. “Next year,” Kris repeated.





	Pair-Bond

**Author's Note:**

  * For [downjune](https://archiveofourown.org/users/downjune/gifts).



> I am currently FULL OF FEELS about Dumo/Tanger circa this season, and yet somehow I wrote fic about them set last season. Who knows how these things work. Anyway these guys have been D-partners for most of three seasons now, which means they're basically hockey-married.
> 
> Written for the prompt “We help each other out.”

Kris went to Marc first, bent over his leg pads. The Pens had had a chance to eliminate the Caps on home ice, and Marc had allowed five goals. There were a lot of things Kris could have said: _the D hung you out to dry, the offense didn’t support you._ They’d mustered just two goals late in the third when it didn’t matter anymore.

But Kris was D, and Kris had left him out to dry, too, watching from up in the press box instead of starting breakouts from behind Marc’s net, where he should have been. Kris with his fucked-up neck and his surgery who’d taken himself off the ice for the entire postseason, no matter how far the Pens went. 

So Kris didn’t say any of those things, only pressed a palm to Marc’s bare shoulder. Marc looked up with a quick, tight smile. “Next game,” Kris said.

Marc took a sharp inhale through his nose. “Next game,” Marc repeated, and turned his attention back to his pads.

Kris moved on, giving a couple of quick words to Sid, Olli, Schultzy. Coler had been on ice for four goals against. For once he had nothing to say; he listened and nodded and never met Kris’s eyes. Kris gave Jake a good word for his goal, even if it had come too late. 

Kris couldn’t do jack shit on the ice, but he could do this, at least, for what little it was worth.

Kris turned, and suddenly Dumo was right there. Only three weeks in, Dumo’s face was already an indistinct fuzzy blur of unkempt beard. He bent his head and said, so soft Kris could barely hear him, “Can I come over later?”

“To my place?” Kris asked dumbly. He flicked his gaze to Ron Hainsey, efficiently stripping out of his base layer. There was a man who was just happy to be here: a postseason at last, and a top pairing role to boot. He and Dumo seemed to be getting on all right, or so Kris had thought. They were all professionals, and everyone did what they had to do to get along. Nothing about their chemistry on the ice suggested any serious incompatibility, sexual or otherwise.

What little was visible of Dumo behind the fuzz was bright red. Then again, he was pretty much always that color after even the mildest exertion. Any kind of exertion, really. “Please?” he said.

“Of course,” Kris said. He was still confused, but there was a tight, anticipatory feeling in his chest. It took him a little time to place what it was: purpose. A chance to help. It’d been a while.

At home, Kris took off his suit. It had marinated in the postgame locker room miasma, but that was what dry-cleaning was for. He put on some sweats and got a beer. There were a handful of texts on his phone, offering condolences on the game and hope for the next—far fewer than this time last year, when he’d been on the ice. 

Dumo let himself in with the key and security code Kris had given him long ago, when it first became clear that Sully wanted them to stick for the long haul. Dumo walked in on Kris in the kitchen and paused. That constant red flush of his had cooled to just a spot of redness on each cheek.

“Beer?” Kris said. 

Dumo licked his lips. “Yeah, that’s—that’d be good.” He went rooting in the fridge, came back with a can of Rivertowne lager, and slid onto the next stool over at the breakfast bar. “Ran out of the Class V, eh?” He flashed Kris a grin.

Kris made the face he always made. “That pine tree shit is not good. I don’t know why you like it.” Dumo shrugged. 

Kris didn’t know why Dumo was here. He felt like he should know, he should be in tune with whatever was happening right now, but he hadn’t skated in two months. He hadn’t put the puck on Dumo’s stick in longer than that, nor taken him to bed and brought him to completion. Kris didn’t know shit. “This about the PK?” he hazarded.

Dumo huffed. “It was pretty crap.”

Four penalties to kill, two goals allowed. Not their finest hour. “Jacques’ll get you guys tightened up for next game. You want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” Dumo said.

So much for that theory. Kris took a long pull, swallowed, and said, “How are things with Hainsey?”

Dumo looked up, startled. “Fine?”

“You’re communicating? Talking okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” Dumo said. He shifted on the stool and didn’t meet Kris’s eyes. He rolled his beer between his hands, unopened. 

“Off the ice, too?” Kris asked. _In bed?_ “You seem like you get along okay. At least, you look fine playing together.”

“It’s fine,” Dumo said curtly. “Not—it’s not the same as with you. I miss you out there, man.”

Shame burned hot in Kris’s throat. It made it hard to speak. “I know. Next year, I’ll—” But Dumo needed him now, the team needed him now, and he was stuck up there in the box with a bird’s-eye view. “Next year,” Kris repeated, instead of _Sorry_ , which Sid and Marc had mostly trained him out of within the first couple of weeks.

“Yeah, man, of course. Good as new.” Dumo flashed him a smile, still bright even behind the fuzz. Having him here in Kris’s kitchen, a beer in his hands, suddenly hit Kris like a sense memory of other times, when that smile meant something different. When Kris had something more to offer than just a listening ear.

Kris cleared his throat. “So what did you want to talk about?”

There was something really fucking wrong in the way Dumo was holding his shoulders. He was the easiest-going guy Kris had ever partnered with. Low-maintenance, Dumo had joked once, but it was the truth. 

“Dumo?”

“It was a shit game. I thought—I don’t usually come here to talk.” Dumo tried another smile, feeble and brief. 

For a moment, Kris could only blink at him. “You—” he began, but didn’t know how to finish. What Dumo usually came here for was sex, and there was no point in having sex now. Nothing they did together could do a single fucking thing for Dumo’s game, because Kris couldn’t be out there with him.

Dumo was already sliding off his stool. “Never mind. This was a dumb idea.”

Kris caught his wrist. “I thought things with Hainsey were fine.”

“They are fine. It’s fine.” Dumo shook his hand free and turned to go.

“Brian,” Kris tried. At his given name, Dumo slowly turned around. He was red again. Kris had raised that flush a lot of times before, sucking Dumo’s dick or mumbling in the afterglow about Dumo’s breakout passes. Usually he liked looking at it. Usually it meant something good. “I don’t understand what’s happening here,” Kris said.

“It’s stupid.” Dumo gave Kris a sad, self-deprecating little smirk. “The game was just shit, you know? And I missed you.”

“I’m sorry,” Kris said, stung, frustration rising despite his best efforts. “I want to be out there.”

“No,” Dumo said. “I don’t—I’m not talking about _hockey_.” He took one heaving breath, and then ducked his head and kissed Kris firmly on the lips. He held the kiss for a moment, softening his mouth against Kris’s. Then he pulled back and stared Kris down, defiant.

Kris hadn’t kissed anyone on the team in months except some making out with Marc just before the first series, _for luck,_ Marc had said. Kris’s mouth tingled. His brain was a white-out; his stomach was tight. He didn’t know what to say. 

“I just wanted to see you, man,” Dumo muttered.

“Not for hockey,” Kris said. He was getting an inkling of what was happening here, but he couldn’t make out the details yet. He couldn’t tell what to do about it.

Dumo shook his head.

“Because if it’s hockey you want, I’m not the right person. I can’t help you with your game, or—or any of that shit.”

“I know,” Dumo said, mouth twisted and unhappy. “I should be fucking Hainsey tonight, right? Get shit smoothed out for next game. I told you this was dumb.” But he didn’t try to walk away again. He just stood there, broad shoulders bowed with the misery of a bad game and now with embarrassment, which was Kris’s fault. 

Kris hated it. He _hated_ it, more even than he would if it’d been Olli or Dales or one of the forwards. A long-banked jealousy burned in his chest. Dumo was _his_ partner, out there on the ice and in other places. 

Kris reached out and curled his fingers around Dumo’s. Dumo looked up, startled into a kind of hopefulness that made Kris ache. “Come on,” Kris said.

Inside his bedroom door, he cupped the back of Dumo’s neck. Dumo came willingly, and this time Kris kissed him. Dumo opened his mouth to him. Kris caught a hint of Gatorade; Dumo’s face fuzz tickled at Kris’s lips. He loomed in close, gratifyingly bigger than Kris, which was one of those many facts that Kris had tucked away in a drawer and forgotten right about the time the surgery had been scheduled.

Undressing was inefficient, because somehow Kris couldn’t keep his hands or his lips off of Dumo. He’d kissed away most of those worry lines in Dumo’s brow, and now Dumo laughed with each new kiss, quiet and pleased. In the light of Kris’s bedroom lamp, Dumo’s eyes glinted with an uncomplicated happiness Kris had taken for granted. 

Finally Kris got Dumo stripped down to nothing. He was flushed pink all over, bruised in places, his shoulders still broad as the Nile, and Kris wanted him with a desire so sudden and sharp it seemed to hurt a little, deep in his gut. Some of it must have shown in his face. “What?” Dumo asked, laughing—good cheer restored. Kris could only shake his head and push Dumo down onto the bed. 

They did it a lot of ways, depending on how the game had gone, what each felt like he needed. On the nights Dumo fucked up and allowed a goal, Kris took care of him; other nights, Dumo returned the favor. Sometimes their frustration was shared, and they took each other down, hard and sharp until both were exhausted, walking into the locker room the next day with new bruises no one commented on. They had a system.

The system was useless tonight. There were no rules, no guidelines. They were skating new ice, freshly frozen and unmarked, without even the circles and zone lines to guide them.

“Fuck me,” Dumo said roughly in Kris’s ear, and far be it from Kris to deny him.

And though the circumstances were new in a way that Kris would worry about some other time, Dumo’s body was still just the same. The helpless grunt he made as Kris pushed into him was still one of the hottest fucking things Kris had ever heard. Keeping a rhythm was a little harder than Kris was used to, his thighs trembling from more exertion than he usually got these days, but he was more than repaid by Dumo’s every gasp beneath him and by the delicious molten drag on his dick.

He came with a sudden, searing heat in his gut that caught him by surprise. He could only grip Dumo’s hips and let it happen to him. Afterwards, weak-jointed, he pulled out and tried to apologize for coming so soon. “I’m an old man now,” he said. Somehow that was easier than _I haven’t fucked anyone in months_ , even though Dumo might’ve guessed it.

Dumo rolled over onto his back and sat up, already shaking his head. He pulled Kris in for a kiss. He reached between them to cradle Kris’s over-sensitive dick in his hand. “Missed this,” Dumo murmured against Kris’s mouth.

Come-drunk, with muscles like water and stripped of all his inhibitions, Kris said, “Me, too.”

Dumo’s hold on his hip tightened. “Yeah?” He pulled back to look Kris uncertainly in the eye. “Like the sex, or—?”

There was too much feeling there for Kris to look at straight-on. He focused on a mole on Dumo’s shoulder, now indistinct against a background of old, yellowed bruise. He smoothed his hand down Dumo’s ribs. “Like everything. You’re all skating, and I can’t even—I have to _watch_. I can’t help, even like this. I can’t do anything.” He’d forgotten a little while, with Dumo. 

“You help,” Dumo said, sounding affronted. “You work with us at practice, and you’re in the locker room. That helps.”

“Yeah, well.” Kris’s throat felt tight and cold.

“No, man.” Dumo leaned into Kris’s field of vision, chasing his gaze. “You’re like, fucking important to us. You know that, right?”

“I—” Kris couldn’t finish. No more words would come.

“Oh my god.” Dumo said it loudly, like he might actually be addressing his exasperation to a deity. He kissed Kris again, efficient and with purpose. He skated a hand up Kris’s spine and pressed his palm flat between Kris’s shoulder blades, pulling him in—but still gently, mindful even now of all the parts of Kris that couldn’t be jostled. 

Dumo murmured, “You’re so fucking important to us. We’re going to win it for you.” Then, very quietly, “I’m going to win it for you.” 

Kris’s breath caught.

“I know that’s not—it’s weird, right, you don’t have to say anything. Fuck.” 

They weren’t supposed to have favorites. Favorites caused divisions and cliques; favorites could split a room down the middle. 

But Kris wasn’t _in_ the room, not really, not any way that mattered. And next year—well, next year was a long time away, practically an eternity. Next year would take care of itself.

Kris put his mouth to Dumo’s ear. “I’m going to get you off now,” he said. He brushed his fingers along Dumo's dick, which had flagged long ago. Dumo’s breath hitched. “Don’t want you to leave disappointed, or maybe you don’t come back.”

For a moment, everything was extremely still. “Come back?” Dumo shifted away from Kris and out of his grip. His eyes were wide and uncertain, not yet willing to hope.

“I’ll get more of that shit beer you like,” Kris offered with more confidence than he felt. Dumo wasn’t wrong. It was pretty weird. Kris just—wasn’t sure he cared anymore.

Now hope began to dawn behind the beard. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Kris tugged Dumo in and kissed him again. “But you have to win game seven first.”

“It’s a deal,” Dumo said, almost laughing, tone airy and bright. “It’s a deal.”

[end]


End file.
